Jane Austen’s Unfinished Novella “Lady Susan” Adapted In LOVE & FRIENDSHIP Film – Stars Kate Beckinsale And Chloë Sevigny

LOVE & FRIENDSHIP is an adaptation of young Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan, believed to have been written in the mid 1790s but revised up to a fair copy prepared in 1805 and finally published by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, in 1871.

Kate Beckinsale on Lady Susan:

“A new Jane Austen is quite a find, I think. It’s quite exciting to find something that people are not necessarily familiar with, either the trajectory of the story, or the characters.

“The thing about the Lady Susan Vernon character is that, unusually for romantic literature, at the core she’s not a very good person. And yet, she’s celebrated in the novella. It is extraordinarily well written and well observed and well drawn.

“This is an epistolary novel and it has its own difficulties in adapting. Lady Susan doesn’t have the same kind of reflection as Emma has, or self-analysis.”

For Austen fans, this is very exciting. Director Whit Stillman says, “Seeing an adaptation of Jane Austen’s early (and not-truly-finished) novella concerning the clever and triumphant Lady Susan Vernon gives hope of adding another Austen volume to the shelf of her great mature works – now in film form.”

Check out the brand new trailer.

Beautiful young widow Lady Susan Vernon visits to the estate of her in-laws to wait out the colourful rumours about her dalliances circulating through polite society.

Whilst ensconced there, she decides to secure a husband for herself and a future for her eligible but reluctant daughter, Frederica.

In doing so she attracts the simultaneous attentions of the young, handsome Reginald DeCourcy, the rich and silly Sir James Martin and the divinely handsome, but married, Lord Manwaring, complicating matters severely.

Catherine Vernon (nee DeCourcy) describes Lady Susan, per Jane Austen:

“She is really excessively pretty… I have seldom seen so lovely a Woman as Lady Susan. She is delicately fair, with fine grey eyes & dark eyelashes; & from her appearance one would not suppose her more than five & twenty… I cannot help feeling that she possesses an uncommon union of Symmetry, Brilliancy, & Grace. Her address to me was so gentle, frank, & even affectionate, that, if I had not known how much she has always disliked me for marrying Mr. Vernon… I should have imagined her an attached friend… Her Countenance is absolutely sweet, & her voice & manner winningly mild. I am sorry it is so, for what is this but Deceit?”

English novelist, biographer and critic Margaret Drabble says of Jane Austen:

There are some great writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these. There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare, that one can imagine….

[Lady Susan was written in the period of the mid-1790s] when Jane Austen was about to start working on her first version of Sense and Sensibility, which was called Elinor and Marianne, and which was also, like Lady Susan, written in letter form. She was about this stage twenty years old.

Clearly, she liked Lady Susan well enough to make a fair copy of it, and not well enough to pursue its publication. Perhaps she was thinking of publication when she copied it, but none of her novels appeared until 1811, and by that point she may well have become dissatisfied with it again.

One could reasonably conjecture that one of her dissatisfactions sprang from the form in which she chose to write it. The letter form of the novel had been popular in the eighteenth century, and was very much a living convention when she tried to use it, but it did not really suit her talents — witness the fact that the second draft of Sense and Sensibility was in the third-person style of narration which she was to use from then on. The letter form is an artificial convention, and she felt its limitations: stylistically, she was a far from conventional writer, and as Virginia Woolf pointed out, she had the courage and originality to find he own way of expressing herself — her own subject matter, her own plots, her own prose. She admired Richardson greatly, all of whose works are written in letters, and she enjoyed Fanny Burney, but their method does not come naturally to her: she points out in her Conclusion, ‘This correspondence, by a meeting between some of the parties and a separation between the others could not, to the great detriment of the Post Office revenue, be continued longer,’ which indicates her sense of unreality in keeping the game up….

LOVE & FRIENDSHIP was an Official Selection of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival ‘Premiere’ Category.

Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions will release LOVE & FRIENDSHIP in theaters on May 13, 2016.